John 5 Hopes the Album He Did With David Lee Roth Will Come Out

John 5's official tenure with David Lee Roth only lasted one album, 1998's DLR Band. But he says that recently, the two recorded an album that has yet to see the light of day. You can listen to the interview below.

"[Roth and I] did another record just recently," he told Jude Gold of Guitar Player's No Guitar Is Safe podcast, "you know, now, I guess, a couple of years ago, or a year ago. I would just go to his house and I'd write these songs with him, and he would say, 'Let's go into the studio.' So he would go to Henson studio and record these songs. They came out...They're so good. They're so good. And we've got Gregg Bissonette playing drums on it, and I played the bass, and they're really great songs."

John 5, who has also worked with Rob Halford, Marilyn Manson and currently Rob Zombie's guitarist, said that Roth "loves the record. But he's doing Van Halen, which is doing great, too. So we'll see what happens in the future."

Splitting his time between Roth and Zombie soon proved to be a bit tiring. As he recalled, John 5 recorded his guitar parts first, without a click track because Roth "wanted that natural feel." But when they brought in Bissonette to play drums, "the engineer was, like, 'Well, we're really gonna need click.' And I'm leaving for a tour with Zombie in, like, 40 hours. So [Dave] called me and he said, 'John, you've gotta come in and record the whole record again with click' [...] And I said, 'Dave, I'm going on tour in, like, 20 hours.' [He said] 'You've gotta do it. You've gotta come in and redo these guitars on the whole record.' Anybody else, I'd be, like, 'You crazy,' but it's Diamond Dave, and so I was, like, 'Okay.' So I went in there — I was exhausted — and I played this record to the click — everything; all the harmonies… everything."

Back in 2012, John 5 said that he had worked on an acoustic album with Roth that contained "lots of cool, crazy jazz chords” and “50 or 60 overdubbed guitar tracks with all this harmonizing and other weird stuff going on." It's unknown as of now whether this is the same project or something different.

Listen to John 5 on the 'No Guitar Is Safe' Podcast

See David Lee Roth and Other Rockers in the Top 100 Albums of the '80s